The article concludes by questioning the dream of many Brexiteers of ‘Britain as a powerful, buccaneering nation, charting its own course in world’.

Whilst Theresa May was one of the first global leaders to offer public support to Trump for his Syrian intervention last week, it is clear that the ‘Special Relationship‘ is not so special with Boris as FS.

Because of Obama’s dithering, we now learn from other sources that ISIS has now copied the North Vietnamese by tunnelling beneath houses in the cities which form their strongholds and running electricity into the system so that they can survive the bombing. It seems they have been tunnelling using jackhammers, whilst their leaders have already decamped to Mosul, where no doubt they will be mixed in with the population as “human shields”.

Rooting out ISIL is going to take huge numbers of “boots on the ground” and very high casualties because we have allowed our squeamishness about civilian casualties to override our need to protect the lives of our troops. Turning the area into a “Free fire zone”, having surrounded it with troops and some of the new storming robots and then using bunker busting thermobaric weapons would spare our troops and get the job done including blowing up the ISIS tunnels. But because of Obama’s weakness, there will now be huge collateral damage.

The US was not so squeamish when it fire bombed Tokyo, used an atomic bomb on Hiroshima or used incendiary devices on Dresden during World War II to raze that city to the ground. Then we had the will to win and get the job done. Russia, France and the rest of us must find it again or we will all pay the price later. There’s no point in waiting for Obama to take the lead – this would take a Pearl Harbour type escalation.